Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Foam

Foam - 326 words

Kevin Foster

His father had been ill since before their long engagement began and he had been hospitalized in the interim between the ceremony and the day they left down the coast. She had wanted to stay, to be with her husband's father, a man she had only met a handful of times, to show her husband how devoted she would be, but he insisted that they leave. The call had come on the second day; his mother's voice was broken, but he did not react except to pull over onto a gravel rest area, stand for a moment, and walk toward the water. She followed him.

Seated on the stone ridge about seventy feet from him and ten feet further from edge of the sea, she gazed at his back; his body cut a strong, black shape into the fading light of the day, and he stood motionless. She could not see but his face was stolid and his eyes were dry. She began to cry. She had hoped that any space between them would disappear as they peeled away but kept their fingers grazing together and it would never return, immediately and magically erased, the spaces that she did not have an equivalent of and therefore did not understand, that all of the unknowns and the blackness would be illuminated and he would be bare before her, emotional privacy abolished and infinite intimacy established, but this is not what happened. The sun burned around him and the sea left its disappearing foam rhythmically at his feet, its tiny bubbles popping as the swelling masses seeped invisibly into the sand. She was aware she knew very little. There would always be pieces of him that no time or trust would not allow her. It was not time and it was not trust. It would be an hour before he returned to her and they would drive further down the coast and they would not speak of it.

What is this?

Seven writers, one for each day of the week, write a random number of words inspired by a random word - the word of the day at http://oneword.com - and choose a song to accompany their piece. Theoretically, we'll be doing this for a year. In February of next year, we will have a year in prose.